marked by us to be noticed, but we will not trespass upon the good nature of our readers. The chapters entitled Fair Frailty and Terpsichore are not deficient in warmth of coloring certainly, but we must speak of them in terms of condemnation. We are

Page 135: "Form so perfect was never yet carved in marble-not the Venus is so mellowly moulded. Her outline has not the voluptuousness which is not too much-not over-fastidious in such matters, but we which is not perceptible to mere criticism, and is more a flushing along the form than a greater fulness of the form itself. The Greek Venus was sea-born, but our Egyptian is sun-born. The brown blood of the sun burned along her veins-the soul of the sun streamed shaded from her eyes. She was still, almost statuesquely still. When she danced, it was only stillness intensely stirred."

We should like to know how stillness looks when it is intensely stirred, and how much it can be stirred without ceasing to be stillness, or if the more it is stirred the stiller it becomes?

The Howadji gets sentimental under the palms, and discourses as follows, page 148:

"I knew a palm-tree upon Capri; it stood in select society of shining fig leaves and lustrous oleanders; it overhung the balcony, and so looked far overleaning down upon the blue Mediterranean. Through the dream mists of Southern Italian noons, it looked up the broad bay of Naples and saw vague Vesuvius melting away, or at sunset the isles of the Syrens, whereon they singing sat and wooed Ulysses as he went; or in the full May moonlight the oranges of Sorrento shone across it, great and golden permanent plants of that delicious dark. And from the Sorrento where Tasso was born it looked across to pleasant Posylippo, where Virgil is buried, and to stately Ischia. The Palm of Capri saw all that was fairest and most famous in the Bay of Naples.

"A wandering poet whom I knew sang a sweet song to the Palm, as he dreamed in the moonlight upon that balcony. But it was only the freemasonry of sympathy. It was only syllabled moonshine. For the Palm was a Poet, and all

Palms are Poets."

"Palmam qui meruit ferat," say we, venturing, at the expense of good taste, on the confines of a joke; but this seems to us to be the most maudlin sentiment and unmeaning twaddle that could well be imagined. It is fustian raised to its highest power. The "words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes." Syllabled moonshine alone would not be offensive; but this being not only syllabled, but printed, proof-corrected, and published moonshine, it is an insult to the public taste.

There are many other similar passages

consider the glowing descriptions of voluptuous dances, and observations upon many and allusions to other Oriental manners and customs that occur in these chapters, to be decidedly objectionable in a book that is intended (to use a favorite advertising phrase) to occupy a place upon the drawing-room table. There are some "melancholy mysteries" (to adopt an expression of our author) into which we have not the slightest disposition to pry, and concerning which we should prefer that the fairer and purer portion of our race should remain profoundly ignorant.

We have made the foregoing remarks in no spirit of cavilling or unkindness. Did the book before us not display unmistakable evidences of talent, we should not have noticed it to such an extent. But it contains many passages of remarkable power and great beauty, that prove to us conclusively that the author possesses the ability to achieve a work that shall be an addition to the literature of his country. Let him but disabuse his mind of the idea that alliteration is an embellishment; let him cease to construct sentences on principles of his own, and bestow more attention to purity, propriety, and precision, (the alliteration is accidental;) let him be content to take the English language as he finds it, and be careful in his more sentimental moods lest he make that fatal step from the sublime, and he will write books that we shall have bound in crimson and gold, and give more than one attentive perusal. His nature is often finely touched, and to fine issues. He has a keen sense of the noble, the beautiful, and the ludicrous; the eye of an artist and the soul of a true poet; great power of description, a good command of language, and at times an intensity of thought and expression that astonishes and delights us. And it is on this account that we have expressed ourself so emphatically in our previous pages. We regretted that any one who could do so well should be guilty of the gross mistakes, the affectations, and the fustian, of all of which we have given instances. That our

"So also from the moment the Arabian highlands appeared, we had in their lines and in the ever graceful and suggestive palms, the grand elements of Egyptian architecture. Often in a luminously blue day, as the Howadji sits reading or

tain side, with a stately arcade of palms on the smooth green below, floats upon his eye through the serene sky as the ideal of that mighty Temple which Egyptian architecture struggles to realize; and he feels that he beholds the seed that flowered at last in the Parthenon and all Greek architecture.

readers may judge for themselves and be [adji what Egypt said to the Egyptian; and from convinced that we do not rank our author's the fascination of her face streams all the yearning, ability to write well higher than it deserves, profound and pathetic power that is the soul of the Egyptian day. we will give them a few specimens. The following is an extract from his views of the present position and future prospects of the East:"That the East will never regenerate itself, con-musing before the cabin, the stratified sand mountemporary history shows; nor has any nation of history culminated twice. The spent summer reblooms no more-the Indian summer is but a memory and a delusion. The sole hope of the East is Western inoculation. The child must suckle the age of the parent, and even Medea's wondrous alchemy' will not restore its peculiar prime. If the East awakens, it will be no longer in the turban and red slippers, but in hat and boots. The West is the sea that advances for ever upon the shore; the shore cannot stay it, but becomes the bottom of the ocean. The Western, who lives in the Orient, does not assume the kaftan and the baggy breeches, and those of his Muslim neighbors shrink and disappear before his coat and pantaloons. The Turkish army is clothed like the armies of Europe. The grand Turk himself, Mohammad's vicar, the Commander of the Faithful, has laid away the magnificence of Haroun Alrashid, and wears the simple red Tarboosh, and a stiff suit of military blue. Cairo is an English station to India, and the Howadji does not drink sherbet upon the pyramids, but champagne. The choice Cairo of our Eastern imagination is contaminated with carriages. They are showing the secrets of the streets to the sun." (P. 50.)

Now this has the ring of the true metal. The Howadji speaks here "plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier" and the following description of the landscape of the Nile is an example of truly fine writing. The sentences are well constructed and harmonious, and possess clearness, unity, and strength :

"Nature is only epical here. She has no little lyrics of green groves, and blooming woods, and sequestered lanes -no lonely pastoral landscapes. But from every point the Egyptian could behold the desert heights, and the river, and the sky. This grand and solemn Nature has imposed upon the art of the land the law of its own being and beauty. Out of the landscape, too, springs the mystery of Egyptian character, and the character of its art. For silence is the spirit of these sand mountains, and of this sublime sweep of luminous sky-and silence is the mother of mystery. Primitive man, so surrounded, can then do nothing but what is simple and grand. The pyramids reproduce the impression and the form of the landscape in which they stand. The pyramids say, in the Nature around them, 'Man, his mark.'

“Later, he will be changed by a thousand influences, but can never escape the mystery that haunts his home, and will carve the Sphinx and the strange mystical Memnon. The Sphinx says to the How.

"The beginnings seem to have been, the sculpture of the hills into their own forms,-vast regular chambers cut in the rock or earth, vaulted like the sky that hung over the hills, and like that, starred with gold in a blue space.

"From these came the erection of separate buildings-but always of the same grand and solemn character. In them the majesty of the mountain is repeated. Man cons the lesson which Nature has taught him.

"Exquisite details follow. The fine flower-like forms and foliage that have arrested the quick sensitive eye of artistic genius, appear presently as ornaments of his work. Man as the master, and the symbol of power, stands calm with folded hands in the Osiride columns. Twisted water reeds and palms, whose flowing crests are natural capitals, are added. Then the lotus and acanthus are wreathed around the column, and so the most delicate detail of the Egyptian landscape re-appeared in its art.

"But Egyptian art never loses this character of solemn sublimity. It is not simply infancy, it was the law of its life. The art of Egypt never offered to emancipate itself from this character,-it changed only when strangers came.

"Greece fulfilled Egypt. To the austere grandeur of simple natural forms, Greek art succeeded

as the flower to foliage. The essential strength is retained, but an aerial grace and elegance, an exquisite elaboration followed; as Eve followed Adam, For Grecian temples have a fine feminineness of character when measured with the Egyptian. That hushed harmony of grace-even the snow sparkling marble and the general impression have this difference.

is no fairer or more frequent flower upon these "Such hints are simple and obvious-and there charmed shores than the revelations they make of the simple naturalness of primitive art." (Pp. 62, 63, 64.)

To prove how well he can write in a lighter vein, we give the following clever and amusing description of a Johnny Green (with whom the Howadji met and to whom he applies the sobriquet of Verde Giovane) and his friend, a young London barrister:

"Verde was joyous and gay. He had already been to the pyramids, and had slept in a tomb,

and had his pockets picked as he wandered through gentle culture, as you would upon Greek relics in their disagreeable darkness. He had come freshly Greenland. He was a victim of the Circe, Law, and fast from England, to see the world, omitting but not entirely unhumanized. Like the young Paris and Western Europe on his way,-as he em- king, he was half marble, but not all stony. Gunbarked at Southampton for Alexandria. Being in ning's laugh was very ludicrous. It had no fun in Cairo, he felt himself abroad. Sternhold and Hop-it-no more sweetness than a crow's caw, and it kins were his Laureates, for perpetually on all sprang upon you suddenly and startling, like the kinds of wings of mighty winds he came flying all breaking down of a cart overloaded with stones. abroad. He lost a great deal of money at billiards He was very ugly and moody, and walked apart to jolly' fellows whom he afterward regaled with muttering to himself, and nervously grinning ghastcold punch and choice cigars. He wrangled wildlyly grins, so that Gunning was suspected of insanwith a dragoman of very imperfent English pow-ity-a suspicion that became certainty when he ers, and packed his tea for the voyage in brown fringed his mouth with stiff black bristles, and paper parcels. He was perpetually on the point went up the Nile with Verde Giovane. of leaving. At breakfast, he would take a loud "For the little Verde did say a final farewell at leave of the 'jolly' fellows, and if there were la- last, and left the dining-room gayly and gallantly, dies in the room, he slung his gun in a very aban- as a stage bandit disappears down pasteboard doned manner over his shoulder, and while he ad-rocks to desperate encounters with mugs of beer justed his shot-pouch with careless heroism, as if in the green-room." (Pp. 76-78.) the enemy were in ambush on the stairs,-as who should say, 'I'll do their business easily enough,' he would remark with a meaning smile, that he should stop a day or two at Esne, probably, and then go off humming a song from the Favorita, or an air whose words were well known to the jolly fellows, but would scarcely bear female criti

cism.

ful.

Such touches as the following are delight

Our author is in the town of Asyoot :the dark mud brick, we emerged upon the plain "Threading the town, which is built entirely of between the houses and the mountains. Before us a funeral procession was moving to the tombs, and "After this departure, he had a pleasant way of fully upon the low gusts that wailed more grievthe shrill, melancholy cry of the wailers rang fitre-appearing at the dinner-table, for the pale ale ously, and for a sadder sorrow. We could not was not yet aboard, or the cook was ill, or there overtake the procession, but saw it disappear had been another explosion with the dragoman, among the white domes of the cemetery, as we Verde Giovane found the Cairene evenings 'slow.' began to climb the hills to the caves-temples, I It was astonishing how much execution he accom- might say, for their tombs are temples who reverplished with those words of very moderate calibre, ence the dead, and these were built with a temple slow, jolly, and stunning.' The universe grandeur by a race who honored the forms that arranged itself, in Verde Giovane's mind, under life had honored, beyond the tradition or conception those three heads. Presently it was easy to pred- of any other people. Great truths, like the gods, icate his criticisms in any department. He had have no country or age, and over these ancient lofty views of travel. Verde Giovane had come Egyptian portals might have been carved the sayforth to see the world, and vainly might the worlding of the modern German Novalis, the body of seek to be unseen. He wished to push on to Senman is the temple of God." (P. 88.) naar and Ethiopia. It was very slow to go only to the cataracts. Ordinary travel, and places already beheld of men, were not for Verde. But if there were any Chinese wall to be scaled, or the English standard were to be planted upon any vague and awful Himalayan height, or a new oasis were to be revealed in the desert of Sahara, here was the Heaven-appointed Verde Giovane, only awaiting his pale ale, and determined to dally a little at Esne. After subduing the East by travel, he proposed to enter the Caucasian Mountains, and serve as a Russian officer. These things were pleasant to hear, as to behold at Christmas those terrible beheadings of giants by Tom Thumb, for you enjoyed a sweet sense of security and a consciousness that no harm was done. They were wild Arabian romances, attributable to the inspiration of the climate, in the city he found so slow. The Cairenes were listening elsewhere to their poets, Verde Giovane was ours; and we knew very well that he would go quietly up to the first cataract, and then returning to Alexandria, would steam to Jaffa, and thence donkey placidly to Jerusalem, moaning in his sleep of Cheapside and St. Paul's.

"His chum, Gunning, was a brisk little barrister, dried up in the Temple like a small tart sapson. In the course of acquaintance with him, you stumbled surprised upon the remains of geniality and

And the following observations are very forcible:

"The East, like the natures which it symbolizes, is a splendid excess. There is no measure, no moderation in its richness and beauty, or in its squalor and woe. The crocodile looks out from a lotus bank, the snake coils in the corner of the hareem, and a servant who seems slave from the soul out, conducts you to the most dream-like beautiful of women. So, as we sauntered through the bazaar of Asyoot, we passed the figures of men with no trace of manliness, but with faces full of inanity and vice. The impression would be profoundly sad, if you could feel their humanity. But they are so much below the lowest level known to a Western, that they disappear from sympathy. Then suddenly passes a face like a vision, and your eyes turn, fascinated, to follow, as if they had seen the realized perfection of an ideal beauty." (P. 91.)

Our author's account of his first sight of a crocodile deserves to be inserted here:

"He lay upon a sunny sand shore, at our right a hideous, horrible monster-a scaled nightmare upon the day. He was at least twenty feet long

but seeing the Ibis with fleet wings running, he slip-, along these shores history sees not much more ped, slowly soughing, head foremost and leisurely, than we can see. It cannot look within the huninto the river. dred gates of Thebes, and babbles very inarticulately about what it professes to know. We have a vague feeling that this was the eldest born of Time-certainly his most accomplished and wisest child, and that the best of our knowledge is a flower off that trunk. But that is not enough to bring us near to it. The Colossi sit speechless, but do not look as if they would speak our lananother beauty, another feeling than ours, and except to passionless study and universal cosmopolitan interest, Egypt has only the magnetism of mystery for us, until the later days of its decline. "Our human interest enters Egypt with Alexander the Great, and the Greeks, and becomes vivid and redly warm with the Romans and Cleopatra, with Cæsar and Marc Antony, with Hadrian and Antinous. The rest are phantoms and spectres that haunt the shores. Therefore there are two interests and two kinds of remains in Egypt, the Pharaohnic and the Ptolemaic; the former represents the eldest, and the latter the youngest, history of the land. The elder is the genuine old Egyptian interest, the younger the Greco-Egyptian

"It was the first blight upon the beauty of the Nile. The squalid people were at least picturesque, with their costume and water-jars on the shore. But this mole-eyed, dragon-tailed abomination, who is often seen by the same picturesque people sluggishly devouring a grandam or child on the inaccessible opposite bank, was utterly loathsome. Yet he too had his romantic side, the scaly night-guage, even were their tongues loosed. Theirs is mare! so exquisite and perfect are the compensations of nature. For if, in the perpetual presence of forms and climate so beautiful, and the feeling of a life so intense as the Egyptian, there is the constant feeling that the shadow must be as deep as the sun is bright, and that weeds must foully flaunt where flowers are fairest; so, when he shadow sloped and the weed was seen, they ad their own suggestions of an opposite grace, and in this loathsome spawn of slime and mystic waters, it was plain to see the Dragon of oriental romance. Had the Howadji followed this feeling and penetrated to Buto, they might have seen Sinbad's valley. For there Herodotus saw the bones of winged snakes, as the Arabians called them. These, without doubt, were the bones of serpents, which, being seized by birds and borne aloft, seemed to the astonished people to be serpents flying, and were incorporated into the Arabian romances as worthy wonders." (P. 105.)

Although we think the foregoing extracts sufficient to sustain our opinion with our readers as to our author's power, and although they have extended, together with our observations, to a greater length than we originally intended; yet we shall not restrain ourselves until we have given one more extract, and shall make no apology for its length. It is manly and forcible, and, with the exception of a few abbreviations and one or two trifling inaccuracies, we can find no fault either with the matter or style. Some portions of it are truly sublime:

"There is something essentially cheerful, however, in an Egyptian ruin. It stands so boldly bare in the sun and moon, its forms are so massive and precise, its sculptures so simply outlined, and of such serene objectivity of expression, and time deals so gently with the ruin's self, as if reluctant through love or fear to obliterate it, or even to hang it with flowery weepers and green mosses, that your feeling shares the freshness of the ruin, and you reserve for the Coliseum or the Parthenon that luxury of soft sentiment, of which Childe Harold's apostrophe to Rome is the excellent expression. We must add to this, too, the entire separation from our sympathy, of the people and principles that originated these structures. The Romans are our friends and neighbors in time, for they lived only yesterday. History sees clearly to the other side of Rome, and beholds the campagna and the mountains, before the wolf was whelped that mothered the world. But

after the conquest--after the glorious son had returned to eng:aft his own development upon the glorious sire. It was the tree in flower, transplanted. No Howadji denies that the seed was Egyptian, but poet Martineau perpetually reviles the Greeks for their audacity in coming to Egypt, can with difficulty contain her dissatisfaction at word sufficient description and condemnation. But pausing to see the Ptolemaic remains, finds that the Greeks, notwithstanding, rarely spoiled any thing they touched, and here in Egypt they innoclated massiveness with grace, and grandeur with lost. An Egyptian temple built by Greek-taught beauty. Of course there was always something natives, or by Greeks who wished to compromise a thousand jealousies and prejudices, must, like all other architecture, be emblematical of the spirit of the time and of the people. Yet in gaining grace, architecture lost much of its grandeur. The rock the Howadji is not disposed to think that Egyptian temples, or the eldest Egyptian remains, have all the imposing interest of the might and character of primitive races grandly developing in art. But as the art advances to separate structures and slowly casts away a crust of crudities, although it may lose in solid weight, it gains in every other way.

"Then the perfection of any art is always unobtrusive. Yes, in a sense, unimpressive, as the most exquisite of summer days so breathes balm into a vigorous and healthy body, that the individual exists without corporeal consciousness, yet is then most corporeally perfect. In the same way disproportion arrests the attention. Beautiful balance, which is the character of perfection in art or human character or nature, allows no prominent points. Washington is undoubtedly always underrated in our judgments, because he was so well proportioned; and the finest musical performance has such natural ease and quiet, and the colors and treatment of a fine picture such propriety and harmony, that we do not at once know how fine it is. It is the cutting of a razor so sharply edged that